The word "celebrity" now signifies everything and nothing. Fame is the ultimate goal, but literally anyone can be famous if they are in the right place when the roving spotlight stops. Words strain, crack and sometimes break under the pressure, so new ones have been coined to keep pace with the fast-evolving new breed of persons of note: celebutante, sublebrity, popwreck.

But however you want to classify your stars, the noughties has been the decade in which it stopped being about them winning, and became about them losing. This is the age of the trainwreck.

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These days, celebrity-watching is basically indistinguishable from schadenfreude. Were an in-his-prime Jimi Hendrix to perform today, he would simply find his sweat patches ringed in Heat magazine's weekly "circle of shame" feature, probably accompanied by some teeth-grinding caption: "Ewww! He may be experienced - but Jimi's not deodorised." You know how you once thought tabloid puns were scraping the bottom of the barrel? Turns out the barrel has a concealed basement.

In the 1990 documentary In Bed With Madonna, the singer's then boyfriend Warren Beatty observed darkly that "she doesn't want to live off camera, let alone talk", and the film was seen as a watershed in the kind of access the public were given to a celebrity. In Bed With Madonna now looks like a piece of infinitely reserved Victoriana. People have seen Paris Hilton perform fellatio in nightvision. Internet-enabled fans are never more than two clicks away from a Britney Spears upskirt shot.

And so to Britney, arguably the ur-trainwreck. Ill-advised marriages, breakdowns, rehab, knickerless exits from cars, custody battles, videorazzi chases, public insobriety episodes, head shavings (right) - she's ticked them all, and remains an enthralled world's most popular internet search term.

Is this kind of celebrity the fifth horseman of the apocalypse? Well, a pregnancy test found in a room Britney had recently vacated was sold for $5,001. It was bought as an advertising gimmick by a casino that also paid £25,000 for William Shatner's kidney stone, and whose spokesman said: "It's hard to put a price on Britney Spears' urine." "Sooner than you probably think," noted the peerless US gossip blog defamer.com, "the capitalist exchange of items that have passed into and out of Britney Spears' possession will be the dominant mode of commerce in our society (an inevitability originally postulated by Adam Smith in an oft-overlooked section of The Wealth of Nations)."